Today was a later start for the students as we meet Professor Abreu down at the hotel lobby at 12:30. Today on our agenda, we were greeted with our 2nd student tour, the Notre-Dame Cathedral, where we were lead by our student leaders Maria, Claudishor, and Alliyah. As the group leaders they took us from the hotel all the way to the Notre-Dame taking both the 13 and transferring to the 10. After about a 30 minute train ride we arrived to Maubert-Mutaulite where we walked for about 10 minutes and witnessed a lot of comic shops, toy shops, and even a cute cafe that had wall art on it that I definitely have to visit another time. As we arrived to our destination we were greeted with a side view of the Notre-Dame.
From here the tour group talked about the history, some fun facts, and some of the reason as to why the Notre-Dame is designed as it is. Some of my favorite key points of the talk were that the church was built off to praise one of the key people in Christianity our lady Mary, I thought this was such a sweet detail as we don’t praise her enough in a religious setting. Another detail was some of the statues around the pilars and church look like demons but these “demons” are there to protect the church from actual danger. Talking about danger, the church at some point got on fire and it was such a raucous as the church is so fragile it took 15 HOURS to get the fire to burn out, the craziest part to me is I believed this happened around the 1900’s but this actually happened in 2019???? Crazy.
After some time we moved to the front of the church to talk about last minute notes like design features, how the left side door only opens on mother’s day as above sits Lady Mary, some locations like restaurants, stores and more we can visit where then we applaud the group on finishing their tour in the burning conditions Paris is experiencing right now. From here we all walked to La Distillerie de L’arbre Sec where we meet Professor Zinder. At La Distillerie de L’arbre Sec we were separated into 2 groups where we got a talk about 5 different spirits, tastes them as well with cheese, and how the distillery makes their in house spirits. My group sat at the smaller room with Professor Zinder and a staff from the distillery for about an hour where we talked all about cheese, spirits, their in house spirit which was actually the first and my favorite spirit we drank. We all drank 5 spirits, first which was Charlotte’s Ink Gin, their in house spirit, which paired beautifully with a Nettle Tomme a cheese that I have never tried but is possibly my favorite now. We drank a brandy with a Mont vullys tomme, a calvados with a Camembert which was such a interesting and smelly cheese, not a pair in my opinion, a armagnac with a blue cheese and a whisky with a gouda which was my 3rd favorite behind the calvados as they told us the family after dinner would like to eat a salty caramel treat and wanted to incorporate that into a spirit and well it was exactly salty caramel just with a 46% ABV added. After an hour of trying all these spirits we said goodbye and on our own we all were. Afterwards me, Raymond, Ellie, Maria, Kimmy, Astou and kaylee all went shopping afterwards as we didn’t have clothes to combat such high heat in paris reaching up to 96 degrees and, unfortunately, this is just the start.
